Reading by francine j. harris & Julie Otsuka

Photo courtesy francine j. harris

francine j. harris’ third collection, Here is the Sweet Hand, was winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her second collection, play dead, was the winner of the Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston and serves as Consulting Faculty Editor at Gulf Coast.

Julie Otsuka. Photo credit Jean Luc Bertini.

Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (Knopf), won the 2003 Asian American Literary Award and the 2003 American Library Association Alex Award. Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf), was a finalist for the National Book Award 2011 and won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2011 Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. The Buddha in the Attic was an international bestseller and the winner of the prestigious Prix Femina étranger 2012 and the Albatros Literaturpreis 2013. Otsuka’s third novel, The Swimmers, was published by Knopf in 2022.